[unfortunately]

2.7% of men and 1.2% of women self-identified as homosexual or bisexual.

5.3% of men and 5.8% of women reported some same-sex attraction.

7.1% of men and 4.7% of women reported a homosexual experience some time in their life so far.

4.4% of men and 1.4% of women reported a "genital same-sex experience" (oral or anal sex, or any other genital contact) in their life so far.

Here's the ESRI report
http://www.esri.ie/UserFiles/publica...n%20Report.pdf

The 10% was probably just plucked out of the air like the old "we only use 10% of our brains"

[baby and crumble]

The figure of 10% was indeed from the Kinsey studies, but not the way they were originally quoted in this thread.

A good summary of the study is available on the Kinsey Institute website here.

The 1948 and 1953 Studies of Alfred Kinsey

Kinsey's samples are best for younger adults, particularly the college-educated; they are poorest for minorities and those from lower socioeconomic and educational levels. The original male sample included institutionalized men. Paul Gebhard (Gebhard 1979), a Kinsey research associate and later director of the Institute, described Kinsey's sampling method as "quota sampling accompanied by opportunistic collection" (p. 26). Kinsey's data came from in-depth, face-to-face interviews (with 5300 white males and 5940 white females providing almost all of the data).

Sexual Behavior in the Human Male (1948) and Sexual Behavior in the Human Female (1953) reported that:

37% of males and 13% of females had at least some overt homosexual experience to orgasm;

10% of males were more or less exclusively homosexual and 8% of males were exclusively homosexual for at least three years between the ages of 16 and 55. For females, Kinsey reported a range of 2-6% for more or less exclusively homosexual experience/response.

4% of males and 1-3% of females had been exclusively homosexual after the onset of adolescence up to the time of the interview.

Kinsey devised a classification scheme to measure sexual orientation. It is commonly known as the Kinsey Scale

[Pedant]

Originally Posted by unfortunately

Here's the ESRI report
http://www.esri.ie/UserFiles/publica...n%20Report.pdf

The 10% was probably just plucked out of the air like the old "we only use 10% of our brains"

It would be naive to suggest that those figures you've linked actually reflect reality. One needs to consider the social stigma still unfortunately associated with homosexuality.

We know that a huge percentage of homosexual men and women remain in the closet and thus would not identify themselves as homosexual, or admit to having any homosexual contact.

The report you link mentions this on page 127:

WE have suggested that sexual expression may be characterised more as a spectrum than a
dichotomy and that individual identity, attraction and experience may be combined in complex
patterns. The relationship between sexual attraction and experience is important. Though the level of
stigma associated with homosexuality has decreased in recent decades, it is still pronounced in Irish
society. This means that all estimates of same-sex attraction, experience and identity based upon selfreports should be seen as under-estimates.


However, if sexual attraction can be seen as an indicator of an inclination toward same-sex
relationships, we would expect that, given the level of stigma still associated with homosexual
behaviour, the level of same-sex experience reported would be lower than the proportion reporting
same-sex attraction. By the same logic, we would expect that the prevalence of current homosexual
partnerships would be far lower than the proportion that have ever had genital contact with the same
gender or homosexual intercourse (ie, anal or oral sex).

...

The small proportion defining themselves as anything other than heterosexual means we should be
careful in interpreting these statistics. The small numbers involved (1% of the sample defining
themselves as homosexual would total just 57 individuals) mean that the standard errors and
associated confidence intervals are large. We have no comparable figures for the NATSAL surveys in
Britain, but figures from the Australian ASHR survey 6 and US NHSLS 5 are very similar. The figures
suggest that very few Irish people could be said to be ‘homosexual’, but, as already argued, sexual
identity is not necessarily aligned with either sexual attraction or sexual experience.

Also interestingly on page 131 of the report there's a table of the percentage of self-identified homosexual (and those who admitted homosexual contact) with respect to age groups. It is clear that the amount of self-identified homosexuals decreases with increasing age.

[Azure_sky]

Replace gay with gay, lesbian, bi-sexual, bi curious, trans admirer and that percent seems fairly realistic.

[stephen_n]

Originally Posted by baby and crumble

The figure of 10% was indeed from the Kinsey studies, but not the way they were originally quoted in this thread.

A good summary of the study is available on the Kinsey Institute website here.

Well that would seem to put it higher although I read a figure somewhere linked to Kinsey that 6% of males are eclusively homosexual and 4% of females for the duration of their lives so it was either misquoted or I misread it!

[TylerIE]

US Research among Church goers had 13% of males and around 9% of females identifying as homosexual (anonymous surveys IIRC).

I had it in printed form so cant link but that ties near the 10%.

[Ambersky]

Anybody been on a big Gay Pride march and felt there were more than 10% of the population LGBT?

[mrroboto]

7.1% of men and 4.7% of women reported a homosexual experience some time in their life so far.

4.4% of men and 1.4% of women reported a "genital same-sex experience" (oral or anal sex, or any other genital contact) in their life so far.

These statistics really suprised me. I really didn't expect more men to report a homosexual experience than women. I assumed the only men who would have homosexual experiences would be homosexuals. Where as women would be more experimental, with homosexual and hetrosexual women having homosexual experiences. I've seen alot more straight girls kissing each other than straight boys kissing each other. I've never seen that.
So is there more gay men than they are Lesbians in the world. Again I assumed the numbers would be even. I does seem that way, now I think about it. Then again I'm a gay man so my circle of friends will have more gay men than gay women. And my gaydar isn't exactly set to lesbian most of the time.lol